Her father had placed their bed against the north wall so they could look out the new picture window. As with all the other renovations, the bedroom was not finished. The floor was still bare plywood because Daddy didn’t know what Mama would like best: carpeting or hardwood, or painted wide pine planks maybe. And the inside of his own closet had no drywall, no ceiling, just exposed framing and wires, a light fixture screwed right to the open junction box. He had only a few things hanging up in there: a couple of flannel shirts, one good white dress shirt, a blazer and a pair of nice pants he wore to funerals.

She stood in the bedroom now, saw the unmade bed with the new comforter her daddy had bought—it was covered in ducks and hunters in red flannel with guns. She looked around and realized that with the exception of the clothes that had been placed in her new closet, all traces of her mother were gone. The room no longer smelled like her perfume. The top of the dresser had been cleared of Mama’s makeup and stack of magazines. Olive wondered, not for the first time, what Mama would really think when (if) she came home. Wouldn’t it be unsettling to find that everything had changed, that nothing was the way she remembered? Daddy believed it would be this big, wonderful surprise, but Olive couldn’t help but imagine how shocked Mama would be. How the changes might actually make her angry, make her think they’d moved on to new things without her, tried to erase all traces of the way their lives had been before. It would be like the sleeping giant waking up to find everything changed.

Feeling like a trespasser, Olive started with her mother’s closet. What she was looking for exactly, she couldn’t say. A clue. Something unusual. Something to give her some insight into what had been going on with Mama in those last weeks. She went through the pockets of pants, shirts, and jackets, found nothing but breath mints, a Rosy’s Tavern matchbook, receipts from the grocery store and gas station. Nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that told Olive anything new.